Newton’s Niece

My uncle turned to the window as if to escape this imminent flood of disaster. On the window-ledge, I noticed there now stood a human skull.

‘My dear Madam;’ he said, trying for a mode of address which would cover the deep awkwardness he felt in the presence of female feeling. ‘Sister Barton,’ he said. ‘Hannah. Need anyone know?’

She stopped her cramped crying and looked up, licking her lips. Two tears left their traces down her cheeks. Then she looked at me. ‘Can you hear me, child?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ came out my little breathy voice. ‘Yes. I can hear you, Mother.’

‘You’ve changed, boy. Or been changed. Do you know that?’

‘Yes, Mother. I can speak, God be praised.’

‘Now don’t give me any of that. Get up. Get up and look at yourself, boy’ But she recollected herself: ‘That is, I’m sorry, if you can indeed get up, child. I would steady you, but I … I … would rather you tried on your own.’

How different I felt, swivelling my legs in their linen until I could place my feet on the floor. How curiously released. My uncle ostentatiously kept himself turned away, and coughed slightly to inform us of his propriety. Nick was not about.

I pushed down with my left hand on to the head of the couch. Yes, I could stand for a moment or two. All different. The same. Yet all different. Loose, soft.

I had escaped, I thought.

You will not understand me when I say this. You will especially not understand me if you are a woman. There is surely no woman alive today who is not aware that in all the authorities women’s condition is generally held to be more exploited than that of men. Now. And worse in the past. But in my particular set of circumstances – unusual, I grant – and among those with whom I lived, I believed that to be suddenly female was to be suddenly delivered from, I hazard, unwelcome attentions.

And so it was that, having been miraculously changed by the projection experiment, I entered on a phase of life which seemed to promise better things. Yes, I began my new season.

Somehow, perhaps, it’s our musculature which holds memories. By a change of my outward flesh the record of my darkest past was switched off, suspended. It was a blank. As blank a sheet as the linen I wore. Well, blankish – bearing only the painful trace of the week of the projection. Thus I began life as a female. There only remained a shadowy knowledge of the rape – of someone I no longer quite was – and a plan of revenge. Enough to bear, but too little to render me a wolf-girl. So the awkwardnesses were all gone, the stiffness and cramps in the legs, the heavy entrapment of my heart within its ribcage, the wily animality of my neck. This particularly I noticed: my head ached, but seemed to float above my shoulders without effort of mine. It was liberating to my thoughts and feelings. I was light. I felt cleaner. Innocent.

Then I sat down again, being still weak from the shock of the explosion in the laboratory. I had no recollection of how I was borne from there to here, nor of how long I’d taken to recover and ‘develop’ into my new shape. I had no knowledge of whether my uncle saw the experiment as a success – whether this had been the intended outcome, or some incredible catastrophe. I could vaguely remember a blinding flash.

I put my hand to my head, as one does just on to the hairline above the brow, because, with the dull ache throughout, this seemed to be the place to smooth it out. I disturbed an itch, and found a small bump, as if from a blow right to the centre, midway between hairline and crown. The itch was the remains of a scab on the bump. Its pieces flipped down in front of my eyes as I scratched; one landed on my nose. The bump was hard and painful to the touch, but in spite of this there was a compulsion to poke at it as I worried the scab – until I felt drowsy again and organised myself to lie back.

As I did so there was a knock at the outer door, which was opened without pause for reply. I heard my uncle’s voice: ‘Charles. How glad I am to see you. Come in.’

‘Returning to London. Today, Isaac. I shall see you soon? Madam,’ he acknowledged my mother.

Isaac made a hesitating sound in his throat. ‘Going back already? It seems you have only just arrived.’

‘This politicking,’ Charles laughed. ‘It takes up all a man’s time. And to make a final survey of your tender patient’s condition.’ He came into my view, the man in the garden on whose wide dark hat the first few drops had spattered as on the opium poppies. Hatless now, not tall; urbane and smiling, dressed soberly in very good cloth, he moved between me and the window. As I looked back at him I felt the burning embarrassment of the piece of scab sticking to my nose, and dashed it away with my hand.

‘Her eyes are open. There’s hope;’ he said. ‘Your servant, Madam,’ to me. My gaze stretched in astonishment. He looked searchingly back before turning his attention once again to my uncle. Very searchingly. To Isaac, he said: ‘You’ll be most welcome, my dear fellow. I look for you earnestly.’

‘You have thought of me? Of my situation?’ said my uncle. ‘As I described it to you?’

‘Of course I have, Isaac’

‘I’m doubly indebted.’

‘As I to you. London.’

‘It may answer after all,’ said Uncle Isaac. ‘But in what capacity?’

‘I am a man of influence,’ he smiled. Tiredness overcame me. I lost interest and drifted off.

At my next waking I found myself dressed in clothes I recalled all too clearly, including the restraint coat. My heart dumped into the pit of my stomach with a terrible sensation – as if one has not escaped a nightmare by waking after all. My escape had been the dream.

But no. As I came to myself more and more I realised that the painful wolf self had remained transmuted, and that I was still light – merely wrapped in my former style. There were no mirrors – apart from those little optical pieces he had. What was I – to look at? I pressed at the fronts of my coat – soft bubs under the tough, lined, wool facings. Their slight tenderness to the pressure was mine. I stuck my hand between the legs of my breeches, then into my pocket, then round from behind. Then my mother came into the room. I put my hand up to my small, smooth face.

My mother did treat me differently. She was in awe of me. But the plan was, as my uncle had said, to continue to pass me off as the boy she arrived with. Until when, she wanted to know. How long could such a deception be sustained? Surely things would come to light. She was in fear for her life. Isaac told my mother that he would apply himself to the matter with his best attention.

I held my first real conversation. It was with my uncle, after mother went out to see about our journey. Neither of us knew how to begin. I decided it should be me. ‘I have no need to sing, Uncle,’ I said, looking up from the bowl in which I was dipping my bread.

‘What shall we call you?’ he replied. ‘Or more particularly, what shall I call you, since when you return home your conditions of life are to appear unchanged?’

‘Am I to see you again, then, Uncle?’

‘I think you must. I am much shaken, boy, I … I mean … I … You see I cannot name you. I am shaken all to pieces. Every certainty has evaporated, exploded rather. I saw … nothing. Well, indeed I saw a great marvel. I saw the heavens open and … I saw what I had been waiting for. I was jolted back to the edge of the roof despite my precautions. The very air broke apart. Charles held me. He saved my life I believe. The voice of it … Ah my guts chum over now when I think of it.’

He paused. ‘Listen. For my sins I am known about the world – O wretchedness of publication, a vile prostitution to the public gaze – as the man who captured God’s language, who understood His workings, His secret movements. My Principia explains everything … except the matter of the metals, the Chymistry, to which I also sensed myself close, so close. But now all that has … gone up in smoke, quite literally. I understand nothing. Nothing. Because of you.’

‘How because of me?’

‘It is a question of who we are. I … Yes, I am resolved. I see we are bound together. I will tell you things I have told to no man. And because of your changed condition you are still no man to hear it, I suppose. Well, it became clear to me as I grew into my Cambridge self that I had been specially chosen, specially marked out. It would be a fool who did not recognise this. You understand me?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘Do you not know what I have done?’

‘You have turned me into a woman.’

‘No, no, boy … woman. I mean what I have achieved. In the world of Art, Philosophy and Mathematics.’

‘No, Uncle. I can read, but I have only read my Daddy’s Church books, and what I could occasionally steal from Grandad Smith’s shelves, and from Ayskew’s library room.’

‘Like myself as a child.’

‘And the books in your laboratory, but only the pictures, not the language. I know nothing of the world of anything.’

‘Then I’m wasting my words. But I want to inform you – why, I don’t know. Why I should feel compelled to speak to you of myself and my Art, I do not know, I say. It is like an instruction; whose origin, as always, could be either from above or … below.’ He brought his fist down on the table, suddenly, and his face became anguished. ‘Shall I never be free of this ambiguity, this mockery of all I do? You were a monster, and are now a miracle. You’re an escape from reasonable law. To make you rational I should have to claim myself as the Christ, the only miracle-worker, which would be an abominable blasphemy in the light of what I see now. Damn you! You return us all to the abyss, the abyss of superstition. My project is thus in ruins and you are a walking fairy tale. Surely you see this. You cannot be so blank and recondite as you appear. What is it that you are? Amphisbaena. Ha! No. So I tell you once again that God, or someone else too horrible to mention, spoke to me in my ceaseless labours of the wretched Principia. I published, and he has proceeded to destroy me ever after. For what? For my Hubris? For my heart? You tell me, tell me what should I do. I can’t. Boy! Whatever you are! Female thing! Tell me!’ He became suddenly very agitated, but I was not frightened of him.

‘I don’t know what it is you wish me to say, Uncle.’

‘No. I shall teach you. I shall visit. It will be safe: I am unlike most men. You will be my Protégée. I shall tell you … what it is that has ruined me. And between us we shall survive this terrible event.’

‘On the window-ledge. That skull.’ The clay-coloured relic grinned at the room.

‘It’s a gift from … Mr Nicholas. It’s for you.’

We, my mother and I, left Cambridge on one of Mr Trueman’s carrier vehicles, which happened to be going West. She marked my face like a beard shadow with burnt cork, to mar my new beauty. Further to preserve appearances my mother tied my arms by their secret tapes, which was a zaniness, because the whole purpose of the secret tapes was to keep up the illusion that I was normal while travelling. I suppose it made her feel she had some control, particularly when Mr Trueman was there in the depot shed while the wagon was loading and they were saying their farewells. I saw them embracing and touching behind the angle in the wall where the counter ran, his hand thrust into the folds of her skirt.

Then we were bumping out of the city of my transformation at the slow pace of horses, moving off into the dung-smelling countryside. My mother sat up with the driver. Wearing a black hat I sat at the back with my legs dangling over the tailboard. My gift-skull hung from my neck in a net bag which bumped and rolled on my lap.

It was a bright day after the morning mist had cleared – one of Summer’s last throws. The St Neots road ran in lurching ruts while we curved between hedges, or struck across great reaches of stubbled fields, or plodded through villages. Other folk went about their sunlit business without sign of emotion, but the sight of ragged children playing and fighting round a pond triggered me to tears. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. And my tears ran and ran, not with the choking of sobs, but with a kind of permanent rinsing, so that I looked out over leaking elms, smudgy churches, and swimmers. I had the sense that at the back of my mind the other life was being catalogued; we might say now like an expanding video of lewd cartoons, played in another room, from which odd snatches and ungraspable flashes reached me. Or you might say they leaked through to me, because they made me cry even as I didn’t apprehend them. They were assembling and sorting themselves, I think. Their only bright clarity was in their summation: my resolve to destroy Monsieur Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, which had been a turning-point, if you recall the decision I made to out-think them all. And I knew that I was able to be still, and to wait.

So where, I ask now, had the wolf-boy’s cramps and twists gone to? Where were his snarls? Perhaps he was in hell. He had been displaced into another frame of being to await his time; but I think I also knew then that he could touch my thoughts, and that only by his aid should I make good my revenges.

‘Well. What with your uncle’s contribution and my endeavours we’re out of the wood for the time being, as far as money goes,’ said my mother. ‘Thanks be to God.’

His Creation

While I finished growing up, he paid me visits. First, soon after the Incident, I had a letter of his to announce the programme:

‘Here,’ my mother’d said. ‘He sends an enclosed for you. You may count yourself pretty fortunate.

‘Events which I do not specify on paper, child, have led to great alterations in my life. You have known me but a short while, and in that while you have seen me only as the thing I was; which the world now acknowledges was not a nothing indeed but a seer of new worlds and a maker of new contrivances. Nevertheless there are reasons why I must change my state. Where I saw so clearly and for so many years into the meanings of my researches, I find now my vision is muddied; perspectives have shifted, faculties altered. I’m sure he expresses himself very courtly,’ put in my mother, ‘but most of his writing sets me at a loss. You will, perhaps, not understand what I find myself compelled to write - indeed, and to the point at last,’ she said. Then she continued making out the intricate shapes on the page, ‘to you here – suffice it to say, child, that I must go on in an entirely different way. Things are not what they were with me; I shall never find my former self again, I think. A parcel of books will arrive for you shortly by my direction. You are to read them. When I come I shall hope to find you perfect in them. I hope you keep up your duty to my sister your mother, and are of service to her in her bereavement. We are all in God’s hands, to whose mercy you may be assured you are commended by

your Unkle Is. Newton

‘There. He’s decided to make something of himself at last.’

He gave me books indeed. Many, many books. I read them. I was the second woman in his life. The first was his mother, whose death he had overseen, nursing her illness himself until the last – though whether from love, guilt or social obligation I never knew. Every other representative of my current gender he seemed to regard as an advanced example of upholstery. But I was indeed his Protégée; I was one of the two chosen people.

I knew it wasn’t love, on either of our parts, but a kind of double-tracking, which we both acknowledged without question. It puzzled me. I felt it must somehow serve us, though in a way that I was entirely unaware of. But then what was I to do with my beauty and my brain in darkest Northamptonshire? Marry? I had offers.

I hadn’t stayed in the clothes of the wolf-boy. My mother got over her fears. Having seen the advantages of a talking female as opposed to a snarling male, she weighed up the bigotry of the community against the sense of achievement she might get from putting one over on them; and chose to have it given out that she was sending me away North to distant cousins. These were good folk, she said, who were willing to harness her son’s unreclaimability to ceaseless heavy labour, in return for a social chance for their pretty daughter. She flattered herself in the comparison, for though we were Rectory we weren’t rich, and the locality must have conceived a grim impression of the fictitious North Country cousins. Nevertheless in due course mother and son travelled off on one of Trueman’s trailers, even though the affair was technically over; and a clever sleight of hand was achieved between two out-county inns, in time for mother and daughter to meet a return transport.

Of my father? My father lived six weeks after my return from Cambridge. It was some indeterminate disease that wasted the flesh of innocent clergymen and demanded to be flushed through with brandy. He died in delirium when the brandy ran out. He called us in as he lay dying, my brother and sister and myself. He blessed my brother, and kissed Margaret and me. He said he’d always been so proud of his two girls but poisoned worms and now woodlice were tunnelling in his legs. He screamed. Uncle Benjamin Smith, who was staying with us as he so often did, came running upstairs to see what was toward. His wig flapped as he flung into the bedchamber. But his haste was redundant; his brother-in-law had passed on.

Thus I was acknowledged, and was called Catherine Barton, and learned how to live among people.

‘You’ve read the Fermat? And the Wallis?’ he said.

‘It’s too hard, Uncle.’ I sat at a desk in our house. In front of me a rare copy of John Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum, the Arithmetic of Infinites, lay open, on top of a specially made copy in my uncle’s hand of Fermat’s Varia Opera Mathematica. It said:

‘As n becomes indefinitely large, the ratio of the area under the curve to the square enclosing it approaches the limiting value of one third;’ he said. ‘I spoke to you about limits when I last came down, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘Well, then. Have you been idle?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then what do you find hard?’

‘It would help if it were in English,’ I said.

‘Ha! You must stick at your Latin. Without it you’re lost.’

‘Yes, Uncle. But why is it so important that I learn the mathematics? I don’t take naturally to it.’

‘Do you think I took naturally to it?’

‘You must have done. You find it all so straightforward. To me it’s infinitely crooked and tangled. Why does it matter?’

‘It matters because … because … because of the event that we never speak about, and which must not be spoken about – you understand that, girl, don’t you? It must not be mentioned. Ever. To anyone.’

‘Yes, Uncle. I understand that.’ I wondered which event he meant.

‘Well I hope you do, for I’m wrecked if you say it. You don’t want to wreck me do you, Catherine?’

‘No, Uncle;’ I replied. Wreck him? How could I wreck him?

‘Well, then. You must learn this because I must be sure of you. Tcha! You must understand these things. I must share them with you. I must include you. Your mind must be formed according to these designs. It’s to protect you, Catherine. It will protect you from becoming idle, frivolous and wanton, as your sex are most likely to. It’s to protect you from Eve’s faults. I must have you with me. Do you understand? It is imperative.’

I sighed, and looked again at the Wallis: a sea of Latin with numbers and diagrams afloat on it. ‘Yes, Uncle. I understand.’

But in a few years money once again became a serious problem.

It was my mother’s suggestion in all innocence – if I can attach that word to her – that we apply to Uncle Isaac in London to see if I might be something domestic for him. She played into our hands. I was to be with him literally.

He paid for everything. I arrived one bitter March afternoon five years after my transformation, by the West Chester coach which ran up to the metropolis on Watling Street. He met me at the Three Cups Inn just outside Westminster and checked first of all that no one had tampered with my bundle and wickerwork hold-all, and my net bag with Nick Fatio’s gift-skull in it. Then he looked at me. ‘Well, Catherine;’ he said, ‘we recluses are both moved into the fashionable world, at last. What do you think of the great city?’ I’d never thought of myself as a recluse; I’d never voluntarily sought Northamptonshire. But perhaps he had a point, I thought to myself as I looked around me.

‘It’s more than I could have expected,’ I said. What comment could anyone pass who came upon that place for the first time from nowhere? I’d probably seen more people in the previous quarter of an hour than I had in the rest of my life. Cambridge was as nothing beside this. And I felt cold through and through. But I was pleased finally to be here, because it felt as though my destiny were being fulfilled. The last few years in the Midlands, during which I was learning to be human, and female, had brought me up against the tightness of village life – of life in general. The holiday of feeling light was soon over. The wolf self lay primed and potent at the back of my mind, half-known; half-impossible. He was excised from discourse; so how could he have existed? Yet I felt him in me. And how soon did the dealings I had as a female – at church, at market, in the network of visits, or just in casual conversations in the street – yes, the very language I swam in – imprint on my movement, my expression even, all the things I might not do, the places I might not go, and the feelings I might not have. They laced me tighter than my stays. And in this my mother was not, I think, my friend, as she purported to be, but the chief agent of my oppression. She liked having me to talk to around the house, she said; better, she claimed, than my sister. She could see her young self in me, she said. So we developed a mother – daughter relationship of sorts – a relationship grown out of the air, without soil. But in fact she policed me. I played my part, and didn’t know why I was so often on edge, or thrown down in spirits, since I supposed she must love me. She said it was my womb, and taught me how to bind it up with clouts by monthly necessity.

‘How does my womb imprison me?’ I asked. She told me it was the curse of Eve, and not to mention what was disgusting to God. Am I designed for no more than this? I thought.

At night, when my stays were off, when my sister, who lay next to me, was asleep, I tried the womb for whatever was the female equivalent of that sticky release which I sensed had so often soothed the wretched wolf-boy to sleep, and was part, somehow, of his conditioning. But although my own hands could experiment at will, and imaginary lusts could stir me and have me search my body’s secrets out, there was no end available. No inner softening. No rest. Arousal became its own prison; and there were times, whole seasons, which indeed grew longer as I grew older, when I held myself stricter than a nun to fend off the frustration of my own desires. And love? My thoughts were all alchemical, like the King and Queen in the river. I conjured Elizabeth, whose family had moved away. I conjured the love and nakedness of the worthy women of Bridgstock and their drowning husbands, who groped blindly at their breasts.

What then could I accomplish? I had the revenge constantly before me, and when I once dreamed, that, dressed again in my coat, I actually performed it with a garrotte, my spirits lifted and I became almost buoyed up for several days. I started to plan, and speculated on other methods. But rural routine soon stifled the fantasy, while my dreams returned to bad but vague; and being now female I was denied even the opportunities for slaughter which the men had. My father had shot birds, or followed hares with dogs. I disdained to wring the necks of farmyard chickens and had no quarrel with the smooth innocence of the ducks on our pond.